I’m sure by now a lot of you have heard of Songbird. Songbird is Mozilla’s music player – it is open source and under active development. It is currently at version 0.7.0, but there is a 1.0 Release Candidate available for download as well.
In a nutshell, here are the biggest features offered by Songbird, apart from the obvious fact that it plays music files:
- Smart Playlists – create dynamic playlists that automatically update based on criteria you specify
- Concert Tickets – search for local concerts based on the artists in your library
- Last.fm Integration – scrobble, love and ban your tracks
- SHOUTcast Radio – an extensive SHOUTcast directory for your listening pleasure
- Customize with Addons – add anything from themes to management upgrades to your Songbird experience.
Some of the default addons for Songbird include (most notably) iPod support, as well as MTP devices and other popular plugins.
The default interface is clean, and reminds me of the normal iTunes interface. However, Songbird also adds an area to easily browse by Genre, Artist and Album rather than iTunes’ simple sorting mechanism.
There is no single ‘store’ to buy music from by default, although The Hype Machine is integrated, and you can buy/download songs from Amazon, iTunes and eMusic through that. On a quick search through the add-on database, I did find an eMusic plugin. I’m sure others will follow due to the extensibility of the application.
There is a huge directory of SHOUTcast online radio stations, so you’ll never run out of content. I tried a few of the stations while at work, and some of them didn’t work, but most did. I figure the ones that didn’t work used a TCP port that was blocked on the corporate firewall, so that isn’t an issue with Songbird at all.
So is Songbird an iTunes killer? Not yet. Although it supports the iPod, it currently does not support the iPhone or iPod Touch yet, but that is in the works. I think the potential is definitely there, especially with the ability for developers to submit plugins for use with it. Open source software is great that way. The best part about Songbird is the fact that it is open source – it will currently run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
